Chickpea Stew with Tomatoes

This Chickpea Stew couples the sweet, deep flavor of meltingly tender onions and fennel with the bright, vibrant acidity of tomatoes. And you top it off with fresh herbs and briny, crumbled feta cheese.

It’s also mercifully light on your grocery budget, and mercifully simple to make. Plus, you can find the ingredients in just about any grocery store.

I love the vibrant play of sweetness against acidity, especially in savory dishes. Even more, I’m always looking for simple and FAST, flavor-forward meals.

And this chickpea works so well. That’s because the intense flavors of slowly cooked onions and fennel coupled tomatoes offer a nice complement to the muted flavor of chickpeas. Dishes made from chickpeas, like socca or hummus, really benefit from flavor-forward companions like tomatoes, chilies or lemon.

Tips for Making Chickpea Stew

Cook the onions slowly until meltingly sweet. This recipe depends upon the beautiful balance of sweetness, acidity and earthiness. So take the time to cook the onions until sweet and meltingly tender.

Pierce your cherry tomatoes before adding them to the stew. You want the cherry tomatoes to melt into the sauce, but still retain some body. Some cherry tomatoes have thick skins, so piercing them helps them release their juice.

Use Sungold tomatoes if you can find them. These orange-colored cherry tomatoes have such a vibrant, sweet-sour flavor.

Chicken bone broth gives the stew a subtle umami-note, but if you don’t have any handy or are cooking for vegetarians, try swirling in vegetable stock or water with a teaspoon of miso.

Choose chickpeas and tomatoes in glass jars, they’ll have a less metallic flavor and you can find them here, or cook your chickpeas from dried.

Pro Tip: Use chickpeas and tomatoes in glass jars to minimize exposure to plasticizers and BPA. Jovial Foods offers chickpeas that are soaked in advance, pressure cooked and jarred in glass

5 from 1 vote

Chickpea Stew Recipe

The gentle sweetness of slowly cooked onions and garlic blends beautifully with the robust flavor of tomatoes, for a super simple chickpea stew while feta cheese offers a nice salty bite for balance. This recipe was featured in our Dinner Club, check it out here.

To Serve

1/4cupchopped flat-leaf parsley

2tablespoonschopped fresh oregano

6ouncescrumbled feta cheese

1mediumlemon

Instructions

Making Chickpea Stew

Warm the olive oil in the bottom of a Dutch oven set over medium heat. Stir in the onion, garlic, crushed red pepper, dried oregano and fennel. Sauté in the hot oil until fragrant and softened, about 8 minutes.

Pour in the diced tomatoes.

Pierce the cherry tomatoes with a paring knife, and then drop them in the Dutch oven.

Stir in the bone broth, and simmer about 40 minutes until thickened and fragrant. Stir in the chickpeas and continue cooking about 10 minutes further. Turn off the heat and adjust seasoning with fine sea salt.

Finishing the stew.

Ladle the stew into soup bowls and sprinkle with parsley, fresh oregano and feta. Serve with a squeeze of lemon and a swirl of extra virgin olive oil.

Variations

This chickpea stew is super simple to make, and has a bright and deeply complex flavor fueled by slow cooked onions, fennel and plenty of tomatoes. And once you get the hang of it, you can also make some pretty simple adjustments to the recipe, too.

Use dried chickpeas. You can use dried chickpeas – soak 1 cup dry chickpeas overnight in warm water with 1 tablespoon sea salt and 1/4 teaspoon baking soda. Rinse and drain, then cook until tender.

Substitute garlic confit for the fresh garlic. Garlic confit, with its deep and complex sweetness, gives a nice depth of flavor to this dish, too.

Add turmeric, cumin and ginger instead of dried oregano. Then skip the feta, and use chopped cilantro instead of oregano and flat-leaf parsley.

You can skip the chickpeas, and serve this savory, sweet-tart sauce with eggs as in this recipe for Avga me Domates (Greek-Style Eggs with Tomatoes).

Try adding chicken. If you need more protein, stir some diced cooked chicken thighs or chicken breasts into the stew.

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About Jenny

Jenny McGruther is a holistic nutritionist and a Certified Nutritional Therapist (NTP) and food educator. She has traveled the world teaching workshops and lecturing on food activism, sustainable food systems, whole foods, fermentation and culinary traditions. She is the author of two critically acclaimed books including The Nourished Kitchen and Broth and Stock. Jenny and her work have been featured in NPR, Guardian, New York Times, and Washington Post among other publications.

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